Niobe queen of Thebes, daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, boasted that her seven sons and seven daughters surpassed the children of Leto — and Apollo and Artemis answered with arrows until every child was dead, Amphion fell on his sword, and grief turned Niobe herself to weeping stone on Sipylus.1
The boast⚖
The Theban women were wreathed with laurel for Latona when Manto daughter of Tiresias cried that the goddess commanded worship — but Niobe, rich in husband, lineage, and kingdom, refused. She had known Arachne's fate in Maeonia and learned nothing: she counted her children — seven sons and seven daughters in Ovid, though Homer remembers six of each and Apollodorus catalogues rival totals from Hesiod and Herodorus — and mocked Latona for bearing only two.2
The arrows
Leto appealed to her twins; Phoebus and Phoebe descended on Thebes in cloud. On the plain Niobe's sons rode their horses — Ismenus, Sipylus, Phaedimus, Tantalus, and the rest — and Apollo's shafts struck them one by one. At the palace Artemis slew the daughters as they mourned; Niobe spread her arms over the youngest and cried, leave me one! — but the last child died in that embrace.3
The weeping stone⚖
Childless beside the corpses of sons, daughters, and husband, Niobe grew chill as marble; her tears still flowed while a whirlwind bore her to her native mountain on Sipylus, where she stands as stone that drips forever. Ovid leaves her utterly bereft; Apollodorus and Hyginus preserve survivors — a son Amphion or Amyclas, a daughter Chloris or Meliboea — so the house of Tantalus is not always extinguished.4
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How the centuries saw it
Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe
Jacques-Louis David, 1772
David's Rome prize canvas — Apollo and Diana raining arrows on Niobe's children, the Metamorphoses slaughter as neoclassical terror.
Apollo and Diana Kill the Children of Niobe
Jan Boeckhorst, c. 1630–1660
Boeckhorst's Baroque massacre — the twins' wrath among the Niobids, maternal boast answered in blood.
The Florentine Niobids
Unknown (Roman), 1st–2nd century AD (found 1583)
The Florentine Niobids — Roman marble group that taught Europe the myth as sculpture: children dying, mother already turning to stone.
The Children of Niobe Killed by Apollo and Diana
Pierre-Charles Jombert, 1772
Jombert's Prix de Rome — the Niobids falling under Apollo and Diana, Leto's insult paid in a mother's emptied arms.